Information needs of researchers in a bibliographic databases environment: a literature review

This article presents a literature review whose aim was to identify the reported infonnation needs of researchers when they consult bibliographic databases. Initially, 192 articles were retrieved using Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar databases. After applying the criteria for exclusion, the number of articles was reduced to 16, which is already an indicator of the small number of studies on this specific topic. The results show that it is hard to identify thc information needs of researchers. They also show that the researchers have been requiring information with a higher degree of granularity. We conclude that although the available studies provide important infonnation about the researchers' information necds and hints on how to address thcm, there is a necd for more indepth studies. Thc results of these decper studies may be useful to scrvc as an indication for the creation of new procedures and tools, including those based on new metadata elements drawn to improve search results on Linked Open Data tools.